That’s interesting to know, thanks! Most coffee shops where I live would probably never get busy enough to use a spare shot. Perhaps they change out to a single shot portafilter, but I’ve never noticed.

Follow-up question - each portafilter is two shots right? So if you end up adding an third shot to a coffee, what do you do with the leftover fourth one?

(Or do you have a smaller, single shot portafilter?)

Yes that’s true! I find that games like that have their own sort of niche, in which players usually know quite a lot about the game (from watching others play it online) before jumping in. And there’s an expectation that they’ll refer to the wiki regularly. These kind of games can’t have a tutorial that covers everything, because there’s way too much to cover.

This is a weird one for me because it often depends on whether I paid for the game. I got the first Fallout game for free (from GOG or something), and when I inevitably became confused by the UI and objective I ended up giving up on it. If I’d bought the game (either today or back when it came out) I definitely would have invested a lot more time into it, and got past that initial hump. Back when PC games came on disc with an instruction guide, reading that was part of the experience. There’s definitely a awkward period around the early 2000s when games were becoming way more complex, but before in-game tutorials were regularly a thing. I find it hard to go back to a lot of those games.

Likewise I played the first hour of Resident Evil HD on my PS4 (free with PS+) and never had the motivation to get into it. After paying for it in a Humble Bundle, I played through the whole thing on Steam and loved it! The fact that I’d paid for it was able to outweigh the fact that the game was quite outdated. I guess I felt like I wanted to get my money’s worth.

Any game from 2005-ish onwards feels ‘modern’ enough that I don’t usually have this problem.

Glad you enjoyed it! It was a really interesting heist type novel with some great world building. Cool how it basically started its own ‘cyberpunk’ genre.

I’ve read Project Hail Mary - that was great fun, and went to interesting places I wasn’t expecting.

11/22/63 is one I’ve been wanting to read. Will definitely do so at some point next year!

What did you think of Neuromancer? I finished that not too long ago.

Wow that’s a lot! Do you have any particular favourites of the ones you read?

Picking out parts of reviews that you find relevant is a good idea; your enjoyment of any kind of media is subjective and therefore unique to every person. I guess if you can find a particular reviewer with similar tastes, who also happens to have read a lot of the books you’re interested in, their reviews could be a good indicator of whether you’ll enjoy a book. And yes a 4 tends to be my baseline for book reviews; anything less and I didn’t enjoy it that much. 5 is pretty much perfect.

Over-analysis is definitely an issue. It’s inappropriate a lot of the time like you say. Writing a good review is tricky! You have to take into account the target audience, when it was written, whether it’s part of a larger series and so on. Authors and readers are too often obsessed with their overall rating for a book, but the real indicator is what people have actually written in genuine reviews, and whether you agree with that opinion. Unfortunately websites like Goodreads don’t make those reviews easy to find.

Great points. Does Steam get around this slightly by having different tags intended for meme reviews? I.e. I think I’ve seen ‘10 people said this review made them laugh’ or something along those lines. That at least makes it a bit easier to filter out the ‘actual’ reviews. I wonder if the cumulative total (on both Steam and Goodreads) averages out the joke/genuine reviews, assuming that a) enough people have left a review and b) there hasn’t been any review bombing.

And yeah there are plenty of books, games and shows out there that I’ve absolutely loved but they’ve been reviewed terribly by professional reviewers. I think on the whole people assign too much weight to arbitrary totals - “Oh this book is a 6/10 so I shouldn’t waste my time on it”. But if you think like this, you’ll miss out on so much.

Well I hope you’re able to slow down the pace a bit (assuming that’s what you want)!

Ah thanks for clarifying. Would you not say that reading it slower would be the more enjoyable method? If you’re after escapism, wouldn’t it be better to engage yourself fully in the plot? At least for me, I find escapism works best when I’m fully immersed in the story’s world and characters. What you’ve described sounds more akin to someone skimming a research paper.

Storygraph is quite a good alternative from my experience

There is definitely an element of that from the article and I agree it’s ridiculous. Some authors and their followers attack those who give poor reviews (because they can’t accept criticism, instead arguing that a ‘professional’ review would give them a much better score) and on the other side you have people reviewing books that aren’t even out. In many cases it’s no longer a place to find genuine reviews, but an unmoderated wild west with crap at both extremes (a bit like Twitter in that respect). It’s a shame because there are plenty of people leaving great reviews, but it’s becoming much harder to find them.

Out of interest, what do you mean ‘you don’t read too closely’?

Yeah I agree with all that! Definitely a bit too much school life stuff near the start. The story starts to get properly interesting around the halfway mark, but also branches out so much that it’s hard to follow. I’d love to see a similar game in this setting, with an equal complex story but told in a more standard way.

Also yeah Megumi’s part kinda sucked. Didn’t ever get interesting.

Thanks for the clarification on those bits!

The texture of the balloons made me think I was looking at meat for a moment

The monster from Sidmouth

Burning ham

Wait I’m confused… You’re asking for a fan-made mod to be added to the Switch version of Stardew? 🤔

So it’s an average of the different isotopes that can be found? That’s interesting, I wonder how they work out that average. Do you have to take samples all over the world?